Honey, They Skunked the Kids

From The Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday confirmed school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as Education secretary by the narrowest of margins, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking a 50-50 tie in a historic vote.

Two Republicans joined Democrats in the unsuccessful effort to derail the nomination of the wealthy Republican donor. The Senate historian said Pence’s vote was the first by a vice president to break a tie on a Cabinet nomination.

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The Mother of All Candidates

From The New York Times:

STILLWATER, Minn. — Nearly two decades ago, a stay-at-home mother and onetime federal tax lawyer named Michele Bachmann felt a spiritual calling to open her clapboard home here to troubled teenage girls.

“We had our five biological children that God gave to us, and then he called us to take foster children into our home,” Mrs. Bachmann told a Christian audience in 2006. “We thought we were going to take unwed mothers in,” she continued, adding, “We took 23 foster children into our home, and raised them, and launched them off into the world.”

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Holy Crap

From Mark Warren at Esquire  (I’m providing snippets, but you really should just go over and read the whole thing. There’s a video, too):

Lord knows they’d like to water the tree of liberty here in Texas — right now, before it’s too dang late — as the Obammunists pillage and seize everything that’s not tied down, and hollow out the Constitution and enslave us and subvert our food pyramid. Trouble is, it hasn’t rained in, like, a year down here. All the trees are parched, and a bunch of them are on fire. And so as a 21st century man, the governor, Rick Perry, did the only reasonable thing recently and had a resolution passed through the legislature asking for all of his fellow Texans — Mooslims and everybody — to pray for rain […]

…snip…

Now, as the Republican field of likely and announced candidates fails to excite anybody, and as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich lurches to his knees like a tranquilized elephant, and his staff quits en masse and heads to New York City where this week Governor Perry was the featured speaker at a gathering of the city’s roomful of Republicans, speculation is high that Perry is the candidate who will force a complete recalibration of the Republican field and Republican chances next fall — that he is the change we’ve been waiting for, just the man to retake the White House for Texas. (This despite the fact that he is barely more popular than the president in his own state.)

Especially now that Perry has increasingly become the subject of Republican powerbroker fantasies, take a good look at his rain resolution.

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The Wheels on the Bus Go Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

From THINK PROGRESS:

Last week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) — buoyed by legislators who received hundreds of thousands of dollars of special interest cash — signed into law legislation that would dramatically expand access to school vouchers, which funnel taxpayer dollars into private schools. Scott is doing this despite proposing nearly $3 billion in cuts to public education, meaning that he is essentially transferring money from public education to private education.

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American Huckstery

From AlterNet:

Mike Huckabee […] has started a project, “Learn Our History,” where on a monthly basis–sort of like BMG or Columbia House music–Huckabee’s organization will send subscribers Time Travel Academy, an animated children’s cartoon featuring a group of intrepid time travelers who teach lessons about U.S. history “without a political bias.”

If judged by its artistic qualities, the cartoon is so poorly done as to be a pitiable joke. Its main characters are a contrived group of multicultural “tweens.” The history is predictable: Ronald Reagan is America’s savior, America is a Judeo-Christian country preordained by God to be exceptional, and flag-waving jingoistic nationalism is a virtue and never a sin. The guiding principle of this right-wing approved version of U.S. history is simple: “What we see and hear isn’t always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV. We know the truth. And that’s good enough for us.”

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Screwing America, One School at a Time

From AlterNet:

Since the 2010 elections, voucher bills have popped up in legislatures around the nation. From Pennsylvania to Indiana to Florida, state governments across the country have introduced bills that would take money from public schools and use it to send students to private and religious institutions.

Vouchers have always been a staple of the right-wing agenda. Like previous efforts, this most recent push for vouchers is led by a network of conservative think tanks, PACs, Religious Right groups and wealthy conservative donors. But “school choice,” as they euphemistically paint vouchers, is merely a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the total elimination of our public education system.

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

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